The inaugural lecture of the 2021/2022 academic year, titled “The new space race to Mars and its resources“, will be delivered by Jakub Ciążela (Institute of Geological Sciences, Polish Academy of Sciences). The inauguration of the academic year will take place on October 12, 2021 at 11 a.m., online. It will be streamed on YouTube.
Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union fuelled a beautiful and successful race to the Moon in the 1960s. Half a century later, we are at the onset of a new space race to Mars with many more contenders. Only this year, three countries successfully placed their missions to Mars, and the private sector is also joining. One of the major challenges for the future colonization of Mars is access to local resources including water, propellants, and metals. Although Mars colonization is still a long run, scientists already have tools to determine what resources and where we can expect on Mars.
Jakub Ciążela is a doctor of natural sciences graduated in from the Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany. He is a geochemist, mineralogist, and planetary geologist currently working in the Institute of Geological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IGS PAS). He investigates the migration of metals and searches for ore deposits in yet unexplored areas. He was the science member of the International Ocean Discovery Program (IODP) Expedition 360 that started drilling to Earth’s mantle. He is also involved in projects of the International Continental Scientific Drilling Program (ICDP) and European Space Agency missions to Mars. At the IGS PAS, he is a principal investigator of several research grants and he leads the MIRORES team designing a far-infrared spectrometer for the detection of ore mineralization on Mars and the Moon.